It is both an occupational hazard and a personality flaw that I gravitate towards scandal and skulduggery. And yet what a relief to encounter quiet competence! It was a real gift to finally meet Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore as we taped a new episode of The 314 Podcast. I hope you’ll enjoy hearing both his St. Louis story and his perspective on cleaning up the mess he walked into after Kim Gardner resigned.
In other news, Ryan Krull has tallied the feedback sent to County Executive Sam Page on city-county reunification, we’re rounding up our favorite April Fool’s Day jokes, and there’s a new art exhibit worth your time in Maplewood. Oh, and we have a winner for the first quarter of our Where in the Lou game. Can you believe one person managed to get a perfect score on all 11 rounds? Should I invite him on the podcast to share all his tricks?
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Spencer says clock is ticking on city budget as Police Board mulls legal intervention
With the deadline for the City of St. Louis to advance its budget for the next fiscal year coming up in just a few days, the question of how much the city must allocate for its police department may get its answer from a judge. Police commissioner Sonya Jenkins-Gray said Wednesday that a judge or mediator was “how we’re going to get [this resolved],” echoing earlier comments from fellow commissioners Chris Saracino and Edward McVey.
The attorney for the Board of Police Commissioners has stated that he believes the Police Board is entitled to around $330 million. But the board has not yet officially asked for it, instead settling on a lower $250 million figure. That’s still greater than the $208 million Spencer thinks is required by law.
Spencer, meanwhile, has grown impatient. “As you well know, the city is moving forward with its budget next week,” she told commissioners. “We have to, under city charter.” The next meeting for the budget committee of the police board is on April 24, too late for the city’s budget deadline. —Samir Knox
Gabe Gore left a lucrative private practice to become the city's top prosecutor. Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
DEEP DIVE
Circuit Attorney Gore is where he wants to be
When Gabe Gore took over as St. Louis circuit attorney nearly three years ago, the office had famously been compared to a “rudderless ship of chaos.” His predecessor, Kim Gardner, had been outed as being enrolled in an advanced nursing program even as the office around her devolved into disarray. The number of prosecutors on staff plummeted from 60 to just 22.
“I don't think there was a specified homicide unit,” Gore recalls in a new episode of The 314 Podcast. “People were handling the cases that they had to handle, and you had some attorneys handling cases that they really didn't have the experience level to handle. It was a very difficult situation.”
Under Gore, however, the office has been restored to a model of probity. Thanks to a host of new hires, Gore has cleared a huge backlog of cases and dramatically increased the speed at which defendants get their day in court. The turnabout is even more remarkable because Gore had no experience as a prosecutor in the Missouri court system before his hire. He’d worked for five years as a federal prosecutor in the 1990s, but the bulk of his career had been at law firms handling white-collar matters, not at all the bread and butter for the prosecutor’s office in the City of St. Louis.
That may be one reason Gore has made a point of handling his own cases—and not necessarily high-profile ones, either. He pushes back on the idea that the work is somehow humbling after the complex matters he handled at the Dowd Bennett firm. Of the matters handled by his office these days, he says, “In some ways, they're much more complex than the cases I was handling at Dowd Bennett. It is a challenge to get 12 jurors in the city of St. Louis to conclude something beyond a reasonable doubt.” Even so, he’s 2–0 in the cases he’s personally tried.
Go Deeper: Gore is eager to get the office back up to an authorized number of 60 prosecutors (it’s now 58). He believes that, if anything, prosecutions have gotten harder in recent years, citing the discovery demands around body cameras and bystander video. “Even the simple cases now are just more complex because of the video evidence and the discovery issues that arise,” he says.
What’s Next: On The 314 Podcast, Gore opens up about his St. Louis story—and the culture shock of moving to Ballwin as a freshman in high school after growing up in Detroit. He also discusses playing one-on-one basketball with a young law professor named Barack Obama during his years studying at the University of Chicago Law School—and what’s kept him rooted not only in the St. Louis region, but the City of St. Louis, as an adult. —S.F.
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Boy, 13, dies after shooting at school track meet in Ferguson (stltoday): Two boys were shot just before 7 p.m. Tuesday on the parking lot at STEAM Academy at McCluer South-Berkeley High School. The other is expected to survive.
Off-duty SLMPD officer shot daughter's boyfriend (fox2now): Richard Booker's family had "prior problems with" the man he shot three times last week, for which he faces assault charges. Defense attorney Scott Rosenblum says the victim had been arrested earlier that same day and that Booker did not expect to encounter him at the home in Jennings where he opened fire.
St. Louis posts its lowest quarterly homicide total in 20 years (STLPR): The total of 20 homicides so far this year continues a decline in killings that has also been seen nationwide since 2021.
BRANDED CONTENT
What changes when words are sung in an opera vs. spoken in a play?
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis' Principal Conductor says the orchestra becomes part of the storytelling. Learn how music sets the stage in OTSL’s interpretation of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Two paintings in St. Louis artist Barry Leibman's new "Daybook," now at Hoffman LaChance. Courtesy of the artist
Around Town
☕ THE POLITICAL TEA
County Executive SamPage has gotten a lot of feedback since floating the idea of the City of St. Louis re-entering the county. Much of that feedback has carried notes of wariness, and there’s also a little outright hostility. “Change the name of the county so there is no doubt we are separate,” was one of the more than 200 responses submitted to an online portal set up by Page. Even more hostile was the idea floated to disincorporate the city entirely: “St. Charles annexes the north third, St. Louis County annexes the middle, Jefferson County annexes the south.”
Page told SLM yesterday that, “The feedback is definitely on a spectrum.” And fortunately, those responses cited above are not representative. Page says that about 10 percent of people said not to change anything. But of the remaining majority, about half said don't do anything big, and the other half said that they understood something—maybe even something big—needs to happen. “We got a lot of problems. We need some change,” is how Page synopsizes that response. Page says he understands some of the skepticism around city-county merger, given that the ill-fated Better Together attempt left some locals feeling frustrated and even misled. But he notes that skepticism is not the same as pessimism. Key themes from residents included encouragement to “start small,” “prove it first,” and “pick one department and show success.” Asked what has surprised him most in the weeks since he floated the idea of the city and county getting back together a century after getting divorced, he says, “I was surprised that it was initially received with so little pushback.” —Ryan Krull
🪻 THE ART SCENE
Artist Barry Leibman’s new gallery show, which opened late last month at Hoffman LaChance Contemporary, is an exhibition of paintings but also, in some ways, a book. Leibman painted the flowers and trees he observed around town over the last three years before titling the assembled images An Informal Daybook of Botanical Paintings. “Each painting serves as a page in the daybook, an imaginary journal of sorts, from the front cover to the back cover,” he explains. The title came after reading a book about a group of West Coast photographers, Group f.64, which included Ansel Adams, Imogen Cummingham, and Edward Weston. The two-volume The Daybooks of Edward Weston directly inspired Leibman’s title. He says, “The name just stuck. The ‘informal’ was just a way of distancing myself from someone as notable as Weston.” The paintings offer a new way to look at the flora and fauna of St. Louis. Leibman acknowledges the void created by the tornado that ripped through nearby Forest Park last May helped shape his perspective. He says, “I wondered if all the trees and flowers in our world really act as huge vase to hold the sky.” The show runs through April 18, with regular gallery hours on Fridays and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. —S.F.
Eye-rolls, interruptions, and lively debate on local issues. DonnyBash at Sheldon Concert Hall. One night only. Grab your crew and prepare for some STL entertainment. Get tickets.
Heard on the Street
Not running after all: Peter Merideth. The former state rep posted on Facebook yesterday that after much consideration, he decided not to join the Democrats vying for the chance to challenge U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Ballwin). He added, “My friend Fred Wellman IS running, and has already built a ton of momentum and support over the last several months. Fred is a veteran with a proven commitment to serving others, and is the sort of guy that would run into a fire even for a stranger. And this district IS in play.”
Fooling us: All you jokesters! Who knew that Steven Fitzpatrick Smith was ready to revampThe Royale as a “boutique car wash with curbside cocktail service”? Or that Tishaura Jones was so eager to get her old job back? How about Das Bevo losing its blades? It’s funny, yes, but some of this also feels a little too close to home. (Like, seriously, Steve … no more car washes!)
Aging like an old-timey train: Yale Hollander, the noted attorney, comedian, and last living defender of the Loop Trolley, who celebrates a birthday today.Also born on this date: Fellow comedian Buddy Ebsen, in Belleville. Best known for The Beverly Hillbillies, Ebsen left the Metro East for Florida at age 10, just a bit too young to satisfactorily answer the big St. Louis question. He died in 2003 at age 95.
Think you know St. Louis? Well, where in the Lou did we take this photo? Each week, we’ll share an image and you can mark your best guess on our interactive map. Save your guess to our leaderboard; this is the final week of play before we choose a first-quarter winner. Play Now »
Our first quarter of 2026 ended with a bang. Last week’s photo of Burgen Avenue in south St. Louis stumped even some of our best players. Congratulations to Paul Sableman, the lone person to notch a perfect score on all 11 rounds! He now gets (another) prize. And congratulations to the true warriors who joined Paul in acing last week’s puzzler: Brandon Eldridge, Rob Krosley, Nick McClane, Alec Macko, Julie Vomund, Dan Vomund, and Richard H.
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